Moseley School finally overtakes Small Heath School
For the first time in decades, Moseley School (51%) has outperformed Small Heath School (49%) for passes in five GCSE subjects at grades A*-C including and Maths.
Back in 2008 concerned governors of Moseley School would cite Small Heath school as an outstanding school and would question the Moseley School leadership as to why Small Heath school was outperforming Moseley.
Concerned governors would ask:
(a) Why Small Heath School [an inner city school located a deprived area of Birmingham] which draws its students from a similar community, has consistently better results?
(b) what is Moseley School doing wrong and what is Small Heath doing better?
To which employees of Moseley School would say:
- Small Heath School opted out of the Local Authority’s control and, by creating the impression that it has more to offer students, it has attracted greater numbers and could therefore admit more able students.
- Moseley School works closely with all of the schools in its collegiate... but Small Heath School started with higher results and has maintained them. Moseley School has consistently improved its results and so staff needed to be congratulated for this achievement.
- School’s parents needed to question their children about the standards of work that they produce and work with the student and the staff to improve those standards.
Concerned governors would rebut these laughable excuses by querying whether Small heath School could select its students by ability; pointing out that other local schools with a similar student population that had not opted out of Local Authority control had higher results than Moseley and that Moseley School could therefore achieve better results; Governors had repeatedly been provided with the same reasons for poor examination results and that it was necessary to conduct an independent audit.
Three years later, concerned governors were proved right when Ofsted inspected Moseley School and placed it into a category.
Provisional 2014 GCSE Results
For the first time in decades, just over half of the Year 11 cohort of Moseley School passed five GCSE subjects at grades A*-C including English and Maths. Congratulations are in order for the hard work put in bypupils, teachers, head teacher and the governing body. A major milestone has been achieved considering that in 2006 the school hit rock bottom with a 15% pass rate and in 2008 the laughable Moseley Vision was for Moseley School to achieve a 50% pass rate with a Contextual Value Added (CVA) of a miserly 1005 by 2017! The current head teacher, Mr. Craig Jansen has delivered an outcome that so called school expert Thelma Probert OBE and former Head teachers like so called Highly Respected Headteacher (HRH) Tim Boyes can only dream about.
The 2014 results show that pupils of Moseley School can actually achieve - regardless of their socio-economic and cultural background - when the school leadership shows the whites of its eyes; aspirations and expectations are high; the quality of teaching and learning is outstanding; and pay is related to performance / outcomes.
Moseley School still has a very long way to go to address concerns raised in the last Ofsted inspection as well as to reach the Birmingham average and the England average. Moseley School has yet to reach the levels of attainment that neighbouring and other outstanding inner city Birmingham schools are achieving or similar schools serving disadvantaged children such as King Solomon Academy in London. It must be remembered that government floor targets this century have been unambitious and arbitrary. In the good old days of high expectations, pupils were expected to sit and pass at least eight GCE O-levels where passes in English and Maths were taken for granted. Nonetheless, credit where credit is due for breaking the 50% barrier in 2014.